Easy Way to Move your WordPress Blog to a New Domain

I’ve been playin with WordPress for over 2 years now and I can say I’ve learned many things which makes the task easier for you. Today, I’m writing a fully explained article about how you can easily move your WordPress blog from an Old domain to a new one. This is surely going to be a good read.

One of our Reader Rakesh asked me, if I can provide an easy way with which he can migrate his old blog to a new domain and here I am providing an easy to follow tutorial on it. If you need help about anything, you can ask us a question too!

You’ll need to have WordPress installed on your new blog first and access to your admin panel where your blog is hosted and then you can process with the following steps.

Existing Domain

Export your WordPress posts. You’ll find the “Export” option under the “Tools” menu in your WordPress admin of your current domain. Just “export all” and save that file on your computer safely for future use.

Download a copy of your wp-content folder. Here you’ll need FTP access or login to your hosting admin cpanel. Navigate to your wp-content folder of your current wordpress install in the existing domain and download the whole folder in your computer which will be used in your new domain shortly. This download will get all of your themes, plugins, picture uploads and everything. You can also grab a download of your favicon and robots.txt file if you have and if you want from your root directory.

New Domain

Install WordPress. Install WordPress on your new domain if you haven’t yet. This can be done manually or via Fantastico via your cPanel and then move on to the next step.

Upload your wp-content folder. Again, you’ll need the FTP access or admin login to your hostin cPanel. Navigate to the wp-content folder and overwrite it by uploading the one which you downloaded in the 2nd step of your “Existing domain” process above.

Import your WordPress posts. Once done uploading the wp-content folder, you can now go to your wp-admin and you’ll find “import” option under the “tools” menu where you’ll choose the file you exported at the first step of your “Existing domain” process above.

Activate your Plugins and Themes. Now that you’ve got all of your posts and comments back as it was on the old domain, you should go ahead to “Themes” and “Plugins” section of your wp-admin and activate them according to your requirements. You can also look for some additional must have plugins for a wordpress blog.

Update your WordPress settings. You’ll need to configure your WordPress admin “Settings” which matches the settings which you had in your old domain. Look into the settings of your plugins and themes as well. Most Important : Your permalink setup should match no matter what!

Update your URLs. Download and install Update URL WordPress plugin and run it according to your domain changes to keep everything seamless.

Test it up! You’re almost done migrating your old WordPress blog to a new domain. It’s time to test things up. Browse through your new site and see if you have everything working properly and I’m sure it must be!

Now that you’re done with the setup. You’ll need to setup a redirect to your old domain so that it redirects each of the old url to the perfect new domain’s url. You can simply go to your domain registrar and forward the old domain to a new and it’ll take around 6-10 hours to complete the process and it’ll work greatly. If you want an advanced method, here’s how you do it.

Open the .htaccess file of your old domain and paste the following code at the start of the file and save it :

Replace yournewdomain.com with your new domain, whichever it is. Don’t forget to save the file. This will take any request your site receives, and make sure that the url starts (after the http://) with yourdomain.com. If it starts with anything else (say xyzdomain.com, or even www.yourdomain.com), it will be redirected to http://yournewdomain.com.

This was the whole and the only process you needed to migrate your old WordPress blog to a new domain. The nest step which you’ll need to do is to change the address in your feedburner to keep your existing subscribers intact by this migration and make sure they keep receiving your updates. Also, don’t forget to update your Google webmaster tools as per your needs.